This is the Digital Strategy Call with host Brent Lollis and special guest Paul Berry, CEO of RebelMouse, TechStars mentor, and former CTO of the Huffington Post.
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Announcer:
This is the Digital Strategy Call with your host, Brent Lollis, an award winning digital strategist of Fortune 500 CEOs and superstars like Garth Brooks, Taylor Swift, and American Idol mentor, and Big Machine Records founder, Scott Borchetta. Our mission is simple, to help you navigate the warp speed changes in the digital world and make you the undeniable leader in your industry.
Today's guest is Paul Berry, CEO of RebelMouse, TechStars mentor, and former CTO of the Huffington Post.
The Digital Strategy Call is made possible by Creative State, helping you conquer your competition with world class responsive websites, video production, branding, search engine optimization and social media. Go to creativestate.com or call 866-658-7423.
Brent:
Paul Berry. Welcome to The Digital Strategy Call.
Paul:
Thanks for having me. It's great to be on.
Brent:
Many people have described you as having a somewhat unique combination of deep technical expertise as well as a creative marketing mind. That's a pretty rare combination. Do you consider yourself more technical or more creative?
Paul:
I've always fought being thrown into either bucket because like you said my value in my career has been my obsession which is where those two come together. I did that for my dad's software company, Palo Alto Software and we had some viral moments and it changed the business and they say the first thing you do is what you always do after. I did start coding when I was 10 but it's that obsession of where tech overlaps to create audience that I absolutely love.
Brent:
Great, you also served as the CTO of the Huffington Post and when you started there, Facebook was about 3 years old and had less than 50 million users. Today they have 1.7 billion active monthly users and you helped establish the Huffington Post as an early leader in SEO, an early adopter of various social media platforms like Facebook. How do you think those efforts impacted Huffington Post's early trajectory and early growth in establishing them as a leader in their space?
Paul:
The Huffington Post was such a perfect match for me. I want to give credit to the DNA that I got to work with. I met Jonah Peretti and Ken Lear in 2002 and we started working on really crazy things. Dog Island, Jonah had done some Rejection Hotline. Together we did NRA Blacklist. It was built into the DNA that I got to work with to think about distribution with every story. We were constantly building. We believe writers like to be popular and if you give them simple tools that they can understand so that they get 5, 10 minutes at most after and understand life after publish. It became an enormous advantage for us because we were able to gain huge audience through search and through promotion through Facebook and being an early adopter. When I joined, Huffington Post was a blog. It was a really interesting blog but to become - this is actually the future of a media company required all those things to be built in.
Brent:
We talked about that unique mix of where technology and creativity overlap. How do you think that approach makes you a better leader or a better CEO?
I think that there's so many different models for good CEOs. There's two archetypes that I merge with which is the product oriented CEO. A lot of CEOs are much more operators and they find the product person they can trust but there are a lot of founders and CEOs that are product oriented.
Paul:
I think that there's so many different models for good CEOs. There's two archetypes that I merge with which is the product oriented CEO. A lot of CEOs are much more operators and they find the product person they can trust but there are a lot of founders and CEOs that are product oriented. There are technical founders and CEOs. It brings a ton of advantages of course that I rely on that core pillar of how we built RebelMouse. But there are things that you become aware of that are also gaps which to me a long time to find the right CRO for RebelMouse which is a huge thing for me to have that compliment of talent.
It's a mix. Your greatest strength is your greatest weakness.
Brent:
You mentioned RebelMouse. Where did that name come from?
Paul:
I did a lot of testing with names in the beginning. I have, for me, underneath it my dad was a journalist before starting a software company. I went to undergrad in part for literature. I love stories and I believe a name that can tell a story quickly imprints in your mind much better. Angry Birds. Why are they so angry? If you hear it one time and it's done. Angry Birds is branded and sticks. Names that are too specific, like we could have been SocialCMS. So boring and dry and it just defines you overly to one thing that you can't define yourself over time. I like it to have that abstraction but I hate names that are like "Frugalator" and you're like no vowels no ... and everyone has to struggle to remember it and how to type it.
The other thing is that it had a really positive affinity. I would ask people, "Hey" - didn't know that it was my company name. They were a friend but I'd ask them, "Hey what do you think about RebelMouse?" A bunch of people faked it and they're like, "Oh, oh, yeah it's really cool." It's funny but names ... Angry Birds is one that just immediately something pulls you in to love the thing and so that was the model and we are I think that combination of humble but very ambitious is my hope in the company and culture.
Brent:
What was your original vision for the company?
Paul:
I love that it matches exactly to what we're doing today. It came from the experience of HuffPost where the editors and writers and content creators at HuffPost had a huge advantage over their counterparts in other media companies because we built in an understanding of distribution. At HuffPost we played with it, we thought about it, "Can we license this? Can we become a software SaaS type of a company?" but we were at such great momentum in doing what we were doing. I saw a huge opportunity when we were acquired AOL as CTO of the Huffington Post Media Group, all of the AOL media property folded under me and I saw really clearly how no CMS cares about distribution and we had built that in and so we migrated 53 properties down to 13 in 4 months and grew traffic and during that process we also saw wow another massive shift is about to hit everyone where they've moved for searching for content on desktop is going to become mobile through social.
That vision for us to be able to enable content creators to have technology that helps them understand and improve distribution and that content finds it's right audience which doesn't always have to be a viral massive audience. We're very happy, we're really proud of a Blackrock app that we power. They have under 1000 people on it but a ridiculously high net worth. Amazing group that they have there that are deeply engaged and so it's always for us it's get the content to where it should be distributed out and met where the user expects to consume it. That has turned into distributed publishing and that means that you've got to expect that most of your traffic is going to stay on Facebook, not come out of Facebook and likewise on all these other platforms. That was our vision when we started, it's our vision today, it will be in 5 years, in 10 years.
Brent:
You actually recently transitioned the company from a free model to a pure B2B model. Why did that decision make sense and why did it make sense right now?
Paul:
The truth is that we've been doing the B2B enterprise work as the core thing that we've been focusing on for the last 2 to 3 years and we're tremendously proud of what we've done. Hub.united is powered by us, EcoWatch, the Dodo was the 5th largest publisher on Facebook last month and that's a property that's built entirely on RebelMouse and that's been a 3 year real deep partnership where they bring the best content in the world and we bring the best tech in the world.
Ending free actually wasn't actually about beginning B2B. That had begun years ago. Ending free was us looking at it and saying, "Look, when the free product doesn't show all that we do in the best of what we do." Where we're going to get is you're going to end up free trials that let you understand what we do and I think it's very important that people actually understand us for what we're best at. I did love, it's amazing how many core projects were built on the free RebelMouse and since shutting it down, we've had people coming to us that I've built my business around it and I have all this audience on it and I loved it and we're working with them. We're not just shutting them down. That's the thing. We're grandfathering them in, we're showing them how our new tools can make them better, we're figuring out how maybe we can dually monetize together if they have no budget to pay for it, we're helping non-profits, but we want to be understood for what we do. That's really the deeper stuff of the platform where we need to build a sustainable business. I'm very proud of how we have been doing that and are continuing to.
Brent:
You also said that the new RebelMouse will exist as a Switzerland between the social media leaders like Facebook and Twitter. What did you mean by that?
Paul:
That was all built in the free version and everything. The problem that anyone who's in content, whether you're in the brand side or building your start up and thinking of marketing, you've got to think of content or you're a media company. It's very hard to keep up with how fast the giants are moving and to understand when to use one of their products and how to use their products and find the development resources for it. There needs to be a very strong technology company that helps everyone else keep up with everything that's happening. There's enough work for them to do in just getting their content right.
Understand how to do readable videos. That work should be focused so that then there's one platform that keeps them up with everyone. The cool thing is that at scale, we're a partner to Facebook on instant articles, it allows them to release a product and impact a ton of companies at once instead of 1 by 1. I think it's powerful on both sides of the equation. It helps the social media giants have the world move faster and it helps the world keep up with them.
Brent:
You used the term a couple of times Distributed Content Management System. What is that?
Paul:
I'll answer it a little of a long way because this has been my career is that in the very early days, when the internet was just beginning, I started to work on it when it was links, there were no images. It was totally disorganized and Yahoo emerged and that was the way people found content and the key then human category editors and yet to know them, you had to be friends with them and it could change your business because that link from Yahoo was where everyone was finding things on the internet.
Google came and organized it and it took a few years really for SEO to become an industry and now the web was organized that way and people were used to, "I go to Google and I'm never on Google for more than a second." Their obsession was get you off of Google, out to the open web. What's happening now is a massive change and it was predictable, we could see it coming but its come faster than I think anyone would have expected. Acceleration is so quick. What happens now is people really don't search for content. They do occasionally but it's becoming more an edge case instead of the norm. Instead, they've given indicators through the pages they like and social accounts they follow and their friends to have Facebook has an AI agent for all of us. That's where we find our content now. What happens is that when you are on Facebook on your phone and you see a link to click, human behavior changed and it changed really quickly but generally we all hesitate before clicking that link because Facebook has gotten really fast, their app is pre-caching everything and I'm about to click this link, it's going to open a new app which is my browser, they're going to give me a stupid pop up and 3000 ads and it's going to be slow and you just would much rather consume content right there where it's easy.
That means distributed publishing means how do you get your content out in its native format across all these platforms. The media companies we're working with are switching the metrics that they report to their boards and investors and motivate internally. It becomes about reach across all the platforms. For nearly a decade, we were all set that its unique visitors on a website. The website is still important and you still want to build loyalty but it used to be everything and all these networks were just teasers to get them to your website. People who continue to play that game ... it's going to hurt a lot. Facebook pages that are only link posts to themselves, nothing but that, are not doing well in the new algo and won't do well in the near future. They've got to figure out distributed publishing, getting the content out there and understanding how it organically gets shared and they've got to do that awfully quick because human behavior is changing that quick and audiences are behaving like now.
Brent:
In addition to your product itself being a distributed content management system, your actual team at RebelMouse is a very distributed development team spread across many countries and many time zones. We all hear horror stories of businesses wasting countless hours and dollars on overseas developers only to see that effort fail and the money be wasted. How do you make it work?
Paul:
On the counter, there are amazing companies that are making it work. WordPress is a totally distributed company for example and there's a growing list. The way you make it work, there's a few things that you have to follow. The very first thing is that you actually have to want it to work. I've given a lot of people advice and I see the ratios changing. More and more people are getting it and make it work but it's way easier to prove that it won't work than that it can work. That's the first leap.
The second is that you have to ... people begin with this word outsourcing and offshore and freelancers and it's a very condescending beginning. When you hire a person to your team in an office you see, you treat them generally people treat them with a different tone and a different respect. The way we look at it is that we want to cast the net the farthest to the highest quality bar and the world is as small as you want to make it. We don't look for an offshore factory of task zombies in Bangalore. That's why we're in 26 countries is because we're finding brilliant individuals. For us, a brilliant individual, there's a whole thing that we take through to make it work but it's amazing what a brilliant individual can do for you. They get an opportunity to work with this hot start up that's working with United and all this amazing stuff so they get really into it but what matters to me is that their ideas are a part of the company. We're not just asking them to be a task zombie and do this thing.
They understand the vision, they get where we're going, they come up with ideas that are implemented and that change the company and that when you get that culture going there's a seed of development which you can not replicate that speed when you have everyone in a single office in the same time zone. It's just ... people need to sleep. You have to be sustainable but when you pass the baton on these projects so that, "Hey I went to dinner and right before I did, I spent 30 minutes passing it to the guy who is in the other time zone and when I woke up 8 hours of work happened and we traded notes and then oh my God, the client couldn't believe it or Facebook couldn't believe it. RebelMouse had done it again. How'd they get it done so quickly?" The answer is you make global teams works.
Brent:
I saw that Ariana Huffington recently visited your office. Is there anything that you can talk about about how you guys might work together with the new direction and new focus of the company?
Paul:
I think it would be premature right now. I am very excited about it but I think it's premature to talk about right now.
Brent:
Fair enough. Transitioning a little bit, you are also a board member for American Express. Can you tell our listeners a little bit about your involvement with American Express?
Paul:
I'm on the digital advisory board for AMEXOpen and the history for that is that Open Forum was one of the coolest content marketing efforts executed in the last 10 years. Particularly I would say 5 years ago that 10 years back. It was pretty innovative to make it on an Americanexpress.com and invite all these influencers and one of the key guys leading that Scott Rohen ... we spent time together, he and I so he could see how we were building stuff at HuffPost and you can't do that stuff at Amex because of speed and other things. There were a lot of things he adopted and took. He invited me to the Digital Advisory Board. He's now at Blackrock but it's a really awesome group. It's very cool. I've tried to adopt the things that they do there into my own work. It's fantastic group of people that they let just go wild with brainstorms and then bring to focus discussions. They've actually been able to take a lot of those meetings and those creative bursts and turn them into things that are successful in their product. It's been a fun and rewarding experience. They're an amazing team. It's really cool how they're dealing with the legacy and the amazing stuff they've inherited with their brand and how they push through to be able to deal with the digital future.
Brent:
You're also involved as a mentor for TechStars. Tell the listeners about TechStars and why you're passionate about helping entrepreneurs.
Paul:
I came to New York for undergrad. If you look at the New York startup ecosystem in 2001, it was barely anything. It was really agencies and financial institutions. New York is such an incredible vibrant place where people are able to rub against each other literally from all different countries in a very awesome time zone that unites the west coast and Europe. It is so exciting to see what a vibrant startup ecosystem it is now. For me, its very fun. The TechStars program is fantastic. They've vetted people. I get in a room and I go and I brainstorm with them and they give the hardest problems and the people I meet there are the founders and the founding teams. They're genuine, they're earnest, they're working so hard and they have a vision. It's inspiring to me. It's a reminder as you go deeper into a company's life, reminder of those beginnings and how it's a very different phase than when there's just 2 or 3 of you working on an idea.
I love the TechStars program. I love being able to help in the small ways that I can.
Brent:
Final question. You've helped establish multiple businesses as the digital leaders in their industry or their space. What are some universal principals that you think apply to any business that wants to be a digital leader in their space?
Digital just changes so fast. You have to be able to lean forward and have a tolerance for making mistakes but also there's a sense that's required of what's emerging that you have to shift your focus to...
Paul:
One of the most important things that I feel I learned from Ken Lear more than anyone but Jonah Feretti as well is in the same angle completely is that the concept of leaning forward. Digital just changes so fast. You have to be able to lean forward and have a tolerance for making mistakes but also there's a sense that's required of what's emerging that you have to shift your focus to? Facebook's live video product didn't exist and then 3 months ... oh my God, as soon as it became something then ... you have to have this flexibility to shift your priorities to embrace this new emerging thing. Because it's a requirement that you get ahead. Being early to adopt an interesting wave is the way that you really stake ... it's almost like grab that you stake a flag early.
All of that means you have to love change as a fundamental principle. If change makes you ... there are these personality tests and if change makes you uneasy, that is something you have to think about how is your relationship to it going to work because if you hate change, you wake up every day and the world sucks but if you love change, then every day is oh my God, SnapChat's video and what that means and dah dah dah, so I think those are the things that with those sort of principles then you go and tackle problems and you say yes we're going to take the risk and yes we're going to lean forward and yeah I think is where we are going to bet is a new big thing.
Brent:
I appreciate your time. If listeners want more information about you or about RebelMouse, where can they find it?
Paul:
Rebelmouse.com. We have a great presence on Facebook we're proud of and you can email me direct as well. Paul@rebelmouse.com.
Brent:
Paul Berry, thanks for joining us on The Digital Strategy Call.
Paul:
Thanks so much for having me.
Announcer:
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